April 29, 2007

The European Academy of Management is holding its 2007 conference from May 16-19 in Paris.

EURAM is organized around “tracks,” with 33 tracks this year. The conference is looking to be a veritable open innovation reunion, with not one, but two tracks (#12, #15) on the topic of open innovation.

I am excited that (as with DRUID 2006) that there is considerable interest among European academics in open innovation, even if the interest in the US has been more by managers than social science researchers. I am also excited to be attending EURAM for the first time, to be returning to Paris after nearly 20 years, and to be able to present my own open innovation research.

This track is organized by the two major centers of open innovation research in Europe: Oliver Gassman and Ellen Enkel of the University of St. Gallen and Wim Vanhaverbeke and Vareska van de Vrande of the Technical University of Eindhoven.

The two senior faculty are experts in corporate R&D strategies who have helped promulgate among the earliest academic research into Henry Chesbrough’s Open Innovation paradigm. Gassman was the editor of the first academic special issue on open innovation, the June 2006 issue of R&D Management. Vanhaverbeke was co-editor of the first academic book on the paradigm, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm.

The track features 14 papers about various open innovation topics. It also has a keynote by Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School, who (among other things) edited the December 2006 special issue of Research Policy commemorating David Teece’s seminar 1986 paper on “Profiting from Technological Innovation.”

This track is organized by Linus Dahlander and Lars Frederksen of Imperial College London and Franceso Rullani of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa.

The program has a strong open source flavor. The track has 15 papers and two keynote speakers known for their open source research over the past five years. On Thursday morning, it begins with Joel West of San José State, while the track concludes with a keynote by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School.

While most of the papers are about open source, at least two are non-open source papers on user innovation. Most link their research to the community model of collaborative production and consumption, which (if done for profit) is certainly considered an example of open innovation.